The present invention relates generally to a cognitive publication subscriber system with a firewall, and more particularly, but not by way of limitation, to a cognitive publication subscriber system with a firewall for intensive care units and other distracted groups.
Conventionally, medical professionals in Intensive Care Units (ICUs) are bombarded and distracted by a range of sounds and other distractions, e.g. from patient monitors. The number and variety of sounds and other signals can be overwhelming. When the various audio signals become too numerous, it is difficult for support staff to judge how best to filter, control, and attend to the various sounds, by personnel with different levels of experience. If too many signals are present, people may become “blind” to them.
That is, alarm fatigue can occur in many industries, including but not limited to, construction and mining (where backup alarms sound so frequently that they often become senseless background noise) and healthcare (where electronic monitors tracking clinical information, such as vital signs and blood glucose, sound alarms so frequently, and often for such minor reasons, that they lose the urgency and attention-grabbing power that they ought to have). Like crying wolf, such false alarms rob the valid alarms of the value they were intended to add (duly alerting people to danger).”
Conventional techniques to limit alarm fatigue are either topic-based, content-based, or a combination of the two. In the topic-based pub/sub system, a user can subscribe to topics; all the messages that are published to those topics will be delivered to the corresponding subscribers. In the content-based pub/sub system, a user can specify attributes or contents of messages that he/she wants to receive. The messages that contain those contents will be delivered to the subscribers. These conventional techniques fail to consider the cognitive status of the subscriber/receiver.
Other conventional techniques for reducing alarm fatigue include sensor outputs that are delivered to a computer that sounds an alarm, and only if all the sensors that indicate one function (e.g. heart beating) indicate dangerously low operation of that function. This avoids many false alarms caused by one sensor having a low output such as due to accidental disconnection of a wire.
Thus, there is a technical problem in the conventional information disclosing techniques that the techniques do not consider a cognitive state of the subscriber. More specifically, each conventional technique attempts to reduce the amount of alarms without considering the cognitive state of the subscriber who will attend to the alarm when the alarm is activated.